Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

by Gonzalo Barr

  His mother had been fine until a few months before when she started to have headaches and see flashes of light. Her doctor told her that she had cancer and that it had spread to her brain, her back, and legs. His father became angry and took it out by accusing Trip of leaving the butter out, the lights on, drinking too many sodas. After school, Trip and his mother talked for hours, until it was time to make dinner. But once his father came home, Trip went into his room. It was November and the air had cooled enough for them to turn the air conditioner off and open the windows. At night, he lay in bed, imagining that the sound of traffic was really waves that didn’t quite break on a beach.

  One afternoon, Trip came home to find his mother taking her clothes out of the closet and tossing them on the bed. She put them in grocery bags. Together they drove to a church where she left them, like an offering, underneath the statue of Saint Jude. On another afternoon, he coaxed her into playing the piano, an old black upright that needed tuning. He watched her play uncertainly, her hands marked by pinpricks of dried blood and islands of pink skin where adhesive bandages had been pulled off.

  Then she left for the hospital. “Tests,” his father told him. “Don’t worry about it. We have everything under control,” his brother said. But after a week in the hospital, she returned looking worse.

  Then one day, Trip came home from school and found the door to his parents’ room closed. No one answered when he knocked. She’s sleeping, he thought.

  He went back to his room, tossed his book bag into a corner, and put on his headphones to listen to music. His watch read 3:20.

  At 4:55, he took off his headphones and walked into the living room. His brother had not yet returned from the library and the door to his parents’ room was still closed.

  He knocked again. This time, when there was no answer, he opened it.

  On the bed was his mother’s body, naked, one arm hanging off the side, two empty bottles of painkillers next to her.

  Trip does not remember how long he stood there. When they found him, he was sitting in the doorframe, hugging his knees.

  The night of the wake, Trip lay in bed listening to the traffic. He may have fallen asleep. He may have dreamt everything that happened, but he prefers to believe that it did happen, that his mother came into his room and stood next to his bed, much younger and very bright. He sat up, startled, but she did not move. He heard himself ask her, “Why?”

  She closed her eyes and opened them and shrugged. Then she did not move again.

  The next day, the sun was high and the world seemed wrong for a burial. The light was everywhere, making him feel guilty.

  At the cemetery, a man from the funeral home led a ceremony of sorts. The men stood, their hands clasped in front of them. The women dabbed their eyes with paper tissues. A motor whirred and the casket descended halfway into the ground before it stopped. The man from the funeral home gave Trip and his brother each a red rose. His brother, in a neat dark blue blazer, bow tie, and gray trousers, tossed the rose into the grave. Trip did nothing. His father elbowed him, but Trip closed his eyes and held them shut until he heard the motor whir again, longer this time.

  Twenty-one years later, Trip hears it over the TV, the motor lowering his mother’s casket into the ground. He hears the priest leading the rosary, Kharma talking, and Jennifer saying, “Honey? Honey, what’s the matter?”

  What happens next happens quickly. The phone rings. Jennifer answers it.

  Marty says, “Where’s Trip, Jennifer?”

  “He can’t come to the phone. May I take a message?”

  “Get him right now. Because if you don’t, if I have to watch one more minute of this airhead, I am going to drive downtown and personally shut everything down. If it weren’t for old man Meyersohn, I would’ve done that days ago.”

  Trip takes the phone and shouts into it. When he hangs up, he tells Jennifer to get dressed. Less than an hour later, they are at the station.

  Trip goes to confront Marty, but the door to his office is closed and locked. Marty will not come out.

  Reggio tells Trip that Marty wants to show people preparing for the storm, now a hurricane, that is expected to hit overnight. He sends Kharma and Jennifer out with two crews. Trip is ordered to stand by, ready to broadcast. “Marty’s idea,” Reggio says, shrugging.

  Every hour, Walter reports on the position and strength of Hurricane Fay. Kharma and Jennifer report live from places like hardware stores, supermarkets, and gas stations. Jennifer asks a man with a cart full of groceries what he thinks about the storm. “What’s there to think?” the man says. “It’s God’s will.”

  The wind tears down power lines in parts of the city. Trip listens to a voice mail from his maid saying that she will spend the night with her sister.

  Around 7:00, Marty orders coverage of the storm to preempt everything else, the programming to begin at 8:00. Reggio tells Trip to dress and man the desk. Kharma and her crew are set up to do on-cameras from a bar in the suburbs where people will be drinking all night. Jennifer rides in the back of a news truck toward South Beach. On the way there, she asks the driver to turn into the parking lot next to the building where earlier they had reported on the apparitions. The lot is empty and flooded. The building lights blur with each sheet of rain that falls against the truck windows. Then they drive on.

  At 8:00, the words HURRICANE FAY appear across every monitor in the studio accompanied by the sound of punctuated music and howling wind. Trip sits alone at the desk. Walter stands in front of a blue background. Together they report on the hurricane. They go to Kharma. Behind her is a group of young people smiling, waving, and raising their glasses. They go to Jennifer, who stands wearing a cap and raincoat, holding a microphone, the waves breaking on the beach barely visible behind her.

  Outside, winds gust to eighty miles an hour. Walter and Trip go through a checklist of last-minute things to do before the hurricane hits, which is now expected to occur at around 2:00 in the morning. They reach the mayor by phone and interview him. “Everyone is on maximum-alert status for any emergency-type situation,” the mayor says from his bunker.

  Trip and Walter stay on the air until 6:00 in the morning. By then the hurricane has passed through the city and is heading northeast over the Atlantic.

  The techs pat them on the back. Marty appears and shakes Trip’s hand. Then they embrace, and everyone in the studio applauds.

  Trip goes to his office, throws himself on the couch, and sleeps.

  At 10:00, he wakes. He looks for Jennifer. A tech tells him that she went home.

  Trip leaves the station. Outside, the winds buffet his car. The few traffic lights that work flash on and off. He sees only one other vehicle, a city truck.

  Near his house, fallen trees lie on the street, and he has to drive around them. His house looks undamaged, though nothing happens when he clicks the garage door remote control.

  Inside, Trip tries every switch. The power is out. From the family room, he looks through the sliding glass doors at the pool. A large tree branch tore through the screen enclosure and lies half-submerged like a rocket that has crashed nose-first.

  He walks past the bar and into the living room. Light comes in through the windows and reflects on the marble floor. That’s when he smells it.

  In the corner is a dark puddle oozing out of the plexiglass enclosure. Trip buries his face in the crook of his elbow. He stands in the living room, looking at the corner, seeing nothing in particular.

  Melancholy Guide through the Country of Want

  1.

  Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

  —Pablo Neruda

  It is the first Thursday of the month, around 5:00 in the afternoon, and Ugo asks his maid, Paola, to prepare his bath. Afterward, he dresses in a white shirt, a pair of gold ladybug cuff links, a blue tie with pink elephants, and a tailored gray suit of a conservative cut. He tucks a small white pocket square in the breast pocket of his coat, leaving just enough showin
g to suggest that its presence is almost an afterthought. You never want to look like you’re trying. He recites the famous passage from Gastiglione, “Quella esser vera arte che non pare esser arte,” marking each trochee by chopping at the air with an ivory shoehorn, which he then uses to slip his feet into a pair of black leather shoes.

  He is buoyant, dressed for the wine and jazz cocktail at the museum of art, eager to sip oaky Chardonnay and tour the galleries. He won’t stay more than an hour. He does not want to overdo it. It is his first night out in almost two years.

  After the museum, he will come home. Paola will have set out a crystal glass and carafe with mineral water on a silver tray atop the night table next to his bed. There will also be a bottle of aspirins and another of sleeping pills in case he needs them. She is good about details like that.

  Paola is short and brown and dyes her hair the color of a new penny. Her arms are fat and her cheeks wide and flat. She uses the formal voice in Spanish when she addresses Ugo—Sí, Don Ugo. Inmediatamente, señor—and keeps her uniform starched and clean. In the afternoons, Ugo watches her nine-year-old son, Felipe, play in the garden. Every few weeks he buys the boy another book by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, or Robert Louis Stevenson, even though he has never spied the boy reading. With each book, Paola ushers in her son to say “thank you.” At least she is grateful. She is very handy too. She plastered the bullet holes in the bedroom wall and taped a plastic sheet over the shattered panes of the French doors leading to the balcony.

  Paola is the fourth maid Ugo hired since old Mrs. Norcross died. The Norcrosses worked for Ugo’s father when he was single in the early 1950s, his father and mother after they married at the end of that decade, his mother when his father disappeared a few years later, Ugo and his widowed mother for nineteen years, and Anally Ugo alone, when his mother died of cancer thirteen years ago.

  Then Mr. Norcross died, and Ugo told Mrs. Norcross that she could stay in the apartment over the garage where she and her husband had lived for decades. Ugo closed most of the two-story, twenty-four-room house. He limited himself to using one bedroom, a bath, and an adjacent sitting room upstairs, as well as the large library with the view of the bay on the first floor. He didn’t need a live-in maid, he told Mrs. Norcross. He would hire someone to come in for a few hours. All she would have to do is supervise. But she said that idleness was the quickest way to the grave and she would never allow anyone else to do her job. Until the week before she left for the hospital, she kept his house in order, did his laundry, and cooked for him too.

  After Mrs. Norcross died, Ugo’s mail accumulated in his box. The newspapers, which only the Norcrosses had read, piled up next to the front gate, not far from the intercom.

  2.

  Es ella la que viene por la noche, sin que yo la llame, sin que sepa de dónde sale.

  —Juan Carlos Onetti

  The pile of newspapers next to the front gate was the reason that Ugo’s neighbor, Mrs. Bud Alvarez, formerly Mrs. Manny Lustgarten (as in Dr. Lustgarten, the cosmetic dentist who appears in those late-night infomercials), née Bettina Leahy (you’ve seen her late father’s concrete mixers with the stupid green parrot logo going round and round), began to call on him daily and use a funny, singsong voice when she spoke over the intercom.

  “It’s me, Bettina. Are you alive in there?”

  When she learned that Ugo lived without any staff, she occasionally sent her gardeners, three maids, and even food. Bettina—please don’t call me Betty—was in her late twenties, lived in the house next to Ugo, and had recently divorced her plaintiff-attorney husband. Ugo protested all the attention she gave him and even offered to pay for the servants’ time, but Bettina dismissed him. “Now that the divorce is final, I have nothing to do,” she said. “I’ve decided to make you my hobby.”

  One weekend afternoon, Ugo lay next to the pool with a copy of Boethius, which he had taken from his library. He preferred to read the classics in their original Latin or Greek. He was reading the second page, a line that he translated as, “I became aware of a woman of incredible beauty,” or maybe the more correct translation was “a woman of breathtaking appearance,” not “beauty” exactly (he made a mental note to consult the Latin-English dictionary later), when he looked up from the small leather volume and saw Bettina walking toward him wearing a sheer dress, a bikini underneath, high heels, and sunglasses. Her black hair was tied in a bun on the top of her head. Behind her, her butler and a maid carried two trays. A third maid carried an ice chest.

  “Hey there,” Bettina sang out. “I was about to have lunch alfresco by the loggia next to my pool when I saw you sitting here by yourself. ”

  Ugo stood. Bettina greeted him with a kiss on each cheek. Her perfume was bright and smelled of citrus. “I can’t keep letting you do this,” he said.

  The butler directed the maids as they moved a wrought-iron table under the banyan tree, set a white tablecloth, dishes, silverware, and served the food.

  Then Bettina shooed away her butler, and he, in turn, waved the maids out through the gate, closing it ceremoniously behind him.

  She served Ugo slices of prosciutto and melon, tiny scoops of beluga on Melba toast, and a flute of very cold brut that made him squint. She moved her chair next to him. As he ate, she told him stories about her acquaintances—local politicians, basketball players, rap artists, plastic surgeons, people she had met through her ex-husband and who had stopped speaking to her after the divorce. “They weren’t really my friends, anyway.” Every so often, she put her hand on his forearm. She told him about the secret fetish of a TV anchor. “I’m not kidding, his girlfriend needed fifteen stitches. She called the cops on him, of course.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “No one ever gained weight by sharing gossip.” And she told him the never-proven rumor about the former wife of a famous restaurateur. “People say she killed him so she could marry the fast-food tycoon she’s with now. It’s too droll. I’m surprised you don’t know them. You must not get out much.” Then her butler appeared, opened the gate, and ceremoniously announced that the lady’s presence was required at home.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Mr. Alvarez. When Tere answered the door, he burst inside. He claims that several objets d’art belong to him and he is piling them in his car.”

  “Call the police,” Bettina said.

  “They say it is a civil matter, ma’am.”

  “You left him alone in my house.”

  “Tere’s there too.”

  Bettina sighed and stood. Ugo stood too. He watched her walk toward the gate carefully, so her heels would not get stuck in the gaps between the tiles.

  Ugo did not see Bettina again for several days. The table remained as they left it, uneaten melon and prosciutto rotting in the sun. At night, a cat or maybe an opossum licked the caviar out of the shallow jar and ate the remaining fruit, even the rind. The wind blew an empty bottle and the bucket off the table, onto the tiles. The bucket and bottle rolled into the pool. By the third day, a cloud of flies darkened the table. By the fifth day, the flies were gone.

  Years before, when Ugo’s mother was alive, she told and retold him the story about his ancestors. They had sailed from southeast France in the early 1500s to settle on the Caribbean island of Gran Tortuga, which they called La Grande Tortue, an island so small, off the greater island of Hispaniola, that most maps omitted it, especially after World War II, when it became one of the world’s best places to launder money. His ancestors founded the principal city on the island, Saint Michel, and built the port at one end of the harbor. They grew sugarcane, tobacco, and cocoa, and traded with the Dutch for tools, bolts of linen, and Protestant Bibles. When English privateers tried to invade the island in the late 1700s, his bearded ancestors defeated them and set fire to their ships. Those who survived were captured, tied to long wooden spits, and roasted alive over a boucan. A boucan, his mother explained, was a pit with burning charcoal that his ancestors used
to cook the wild boars they hunted with muskets and arquebuses in the densely forested hills inland.

  In gratitude for defending the island, the king of France bestowed upon his ancestors the titles of Comte de Saint Michel de la Tortue and Baron de l’Atalaye. The king gave them two-thirds of the island’s arable land, so that even after the revolution of 1804. and the establishment of the republic, the steady succession of presidents were all handpicked by the family over late-night cognacs at the estate on the hilltop overlooking the harbor.

  For 152 years, two parties, the Whites and the Blues, shared political power. While one party held the presidency for two terms, the other party held the majority in the National Assembly. All citizens over twenty-one were required to vote in every election, even if the outcome had been predetermined in private negotiations.

  The system worked peacefully until 1940, when it was rumored that the presidential candidate for the Blues, one of the most popular men on the island, planned to question the legitimacy of the election, which would have gone to the White candidate, as it was that party’s turn at incumbency. Intermediaries shuttled messages between power brokers, bribes were offered, but the Blue candidate did not waver. The crisis came to a sudden end one rainy evening when the candidate’s driver lost control of his car and drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, including the candidate.

  By official decree, the blue and white flag of the republic flew at half-staff for three dap. The Blue party fielded a substitute candidate, an aging poet with no political experience, and the election took place. Everyone agreed that the poet’s concession speech was the epitome of elegance and style. And while his poems are largely forgotten, students in secondary schools still have to memorize the speech as part of the curriculum.

  By 1950, Ugo’s family owned all the sugar mills and the Banco San Rafael, the island’s largest bank, with offices in New York arid Geneva. During the world wars, they became the third-largest supplier of sugar to the United States, causing severe shortages locally. The cocktail named Bitter Dregs (a shot of light rum, ice, guava juice, and a dash of aromatic bitters) was created by Ugo’s great-grandfather during one of those shortages.